Posted on 03/30/2012 4:08:58 PM PDT by ruralvoter
Eight people have been arrested for allegedly killing two 10-year-old boys and a 55-year-old woman in ritual sacrifices by the cult of La Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, prosecutors in northern Mexico said Friday.
Jose Larrinaga, spokesman for Sonora state prosecutors, said the victims' blood was poured around an altar to the saint, which is depicted as a skeleton holding a scythe and clothed in flowing robes.
The grisly slayings recalled the notorious "narco-satanicos" killings of the 1980s, when 15 bodies, many of them with signs of ritual sacrifice, were unearthed at a ranch outside the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.
While Saint Death has become the focus of a cult among drug traffickers and criminals in Mexico in recent years, there have been no confirmed cases of human sacrifices in Mexico to the scary-looking saint, which is not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. Worshippers usually offer candy, cigarettes and incense to the skeleton-statue.
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
I’ve seen that and cannot understand how anybody can worship that thing.
I would not be surprised at all to learn that this “saint” is equated with an actual saint in magical rituals, as certainly is the case in Voodoo.
“Santa Muerte” has nothing to do with Catholicism, sorry.
Santa Muerte is pure Aztec, the goddess of the underworld Mictecacihuatl, with Catholic trappings. With an estimated 2m or more believers of some extent or other, this cult represents an extremely grave threat, one that only the Catholic church so far seems to appreciate.
Death worshiping cults are inherently extremely dangerous, and when they turn murderous, they become very murderous, and indiscreet about who they murder.
The best comparison to Santa Muerte is probably the Indian Thuggee, who at their peak were just a fraction of the size of the Santa Muerte cult, yet came close to paralyzing all of India. The British had to militarily wipe them out, in a war of extermination, *twice*. Much to the relief of about everyone else in India.
All Santa Muerte really needs is a charismatic leader, and they could throw much of North America into confusion. Anyone of a Hispanic or Mexican Indian background, anywhere, would have to be looked at as suspicious. Men, women, even children could without warning become homicidal.
Sad to say but those folks DO practice non-Catholicism. Some of them bring it to the USA. Yuck.
Those south-of-the-border folks who ARE syncretistic in their Catholic faith are Catholics in name only....NOT practicing Catholics. Adding ANYTHING from their culture which changes Church doctrine and morality is a grevous sin--no animal/human sacrifice, no voodoo, no real blood, no dancing, just the facts, ma'am way the faith (Mass, sacraments, Scripture, catechism) is taught by Church fathers.
Got caught up in the Sergeant Friday mode there for a moment.
Amen.
That's true, but it's also not, exactly. The cult of Lady Death isn't Catholic, but it's part of the culture of some Catholics. There's a woman in our congregation who has a tattoo of Santa Muerte on her arm! Now, it may be a remnant of her life pre-conversion, but I also think that some of our people have been so isolated from docrinally-sound Catholicism that they don't see a contradiction between worshipping God, honoring the saints, and propitiating what they recognize as powerful forces of evil.
It's textbook paganism, of course, but they don't realize it. The Church has been struggling in Mexico for over 100 years, and many of the people are genuinely devout, *as they understand it*, but tragically untaught. The Salvadorans have some of the same problems with violence and drugs as Mexico, but they don't have the same issues with religious syncretism. They're the backbone of the Spanish-speaking Charismatic Renewal, great Bible-readers and very evangelical.
It's just odd how all these magical, ritualistic practices get tacked onto Catholicism all across Mexico, Central and South America and in the Caribbean.
Wonder why that might be? Can you think of a single one of these syncretist beliefs associated with, say, Baptists for instance? I can't. It's always Catholicism.
I’ve known a few people who somehow managed to get paganism or even occult tangled in with their professed Christianity. Most are sincere, but misguided as you note. But, there are others who are rather more cynical, who recognize the power of Christianity only so far as it’s of service to self, and they’re the ones who really bother me. It verges upon satanic. In the US at least, these aren’t always Catholic, some are failed Protestants and usually out of the more liturgically oriented demominations, others really had no professed belief prior, but they’re always nihilists with a dark cloud following them.
The mixture of traditional and Protestant Christian beliefs in Africa has many elements in common with the mixture of traditional and Catholic Christian beliefs in Latin America. Read up on Liberia, for example.
And what about the Prosperity Gospel movement, so prominent in current American Protestantism? Isn't that, in many ways, similar to a pagan understanding of man's relationship to divinity? In its American incarnation, it lacks the "color" of Mexican distortions of Catholicism, but in Africa ...
Aah, the “money churches.”. Fair enough, but I’ve never regarded them as particularly pagan, just crass.
Like Barack Obama? I don't think that he and the Black Liberation Theology (pass the Islam!) movement are an outgrowth of "liturgical denominations." At least not a proximate outgrowth! "African Methodist Episcopal" doesn't look like Methodist or Episcopal services I've attended, not that some of them aren't nice people, and they throw a heck of a barbecue fundraiser.
I think you're drawing an erroneous conclusion from insufficient data. I think it's less a question of Catholic or Protestant than of historical factors, which Christian communion first interacted with a pagan, tribal society first. Even Eastern Orthodoxy gets rather unusual, in Africa and Southeast Asia.
After that, there are a batch of other historical factors. We think of Mexico as a "Catholic country," but for well over a hundred years it's had an anti-Catholic government beyond (well, in reach of ...) Obama's wildest dreams. Some of our Mexican parishioners, especially from the northern states, went many years without regular Mass, without seeing a priest, without any catechesis. All they knew was what their parents and grandparents remembers, and cultural accretions of who-knows-what.
Then you weren't looking at the essence. The essence of paganism is, "I give you, you give me," or "I pay you, you don't Zot me." One version or the other characterizes most overtly pagan religions and most distortions of Christianity or of Judaism.
“Name it and claim it” is at base magical thinking, so point taken.
No rituals let alone bloodletting or sacrifice associated with it, though, so it doesn’t jump out as such. No strange gods, just money and more stuff.
Crass.
No, it's only associated with Mexicans, because it's a direct carryover of the Aztec god of the underworld.
It was there before Catholicism arrived. External trappings may have changed, but it's the same pagan belief all along.
And it's been condemned by the Church.
"Money and more stuff" is a "strange god". It's one of the more pernicious idols you'll find, all the moreso because it doesn't necessarily come with any exotic pagan trappings.
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